kip/bot/blog

I’m a big fan of people knowing how to code. Not in-depth, elaborate knowledge or every sorting algorithm, or alternatives to various ____ transforms, but the ability to handle variables, manage loops, create logic that yields something more quickly and accurately than pen and paper, or spreadsheet. Enough code to work with a dataset, rather than forcing your spreadsheet into a clumsy database that leads to mistakes and prevents interesting exploration. Enough code to visualize and play with ideas, enough code to create interfaces. The Shallows is showing us that our highly plastic brains (or minds) can be shaped by the simplest of technological habits and modes. So what about our passive relationship to the screens on our devices? If we always watch, watch, watch and click, click, click, but never take the initiative, what happens to us? I love Rushkoff’s notion that most of society lags behind its technology, leaving us with passive audiences who accept the technological result, and the elite who creates it. I’m late to the party and really struggling to get my hands on the damn book, but this is worth putting effort into.

Via Alex Rainert (@arainert, www.everydayux.com), an excellent article about Facebook Messages that is a perfect example of how easy it is to get design thinking wrong. The article titled “Why Facebook Badly Needs Steve Jobs” is rich with examples of all the things you can get wrong in the design space:

Oversimplification of the space — “email, sms, IM — it’s all just people talking, make them the same!” This is a classic, non-designery approach to something. Conflating things that look vaguely alike (people exchanging strings of text on a computing device), is marketing thinking about features, not design thinking which takes into account purpose, (a)synchronicity, and context.

Missing the details — one of the biggest misses of the Facebook Message plan is how it overlooks the highly evolved feature-behavior pairings that exist in the electronic messaging space. People have come to rely on various reply, threading, search, group distribution behaviors that each of the messaging platforms/types bring.

Exaggerating a potential pain point into a problem that needs to be solved — “Joel Seligstein, a Facebook engineer, is relieved he no longer needs to keep track of which friends like texts vs. email vs. chat.” This is the classic thing Apple gets right — not solving things that aren’t really problems. With the early version of the iPod, Apple never solved for lateral navigation of music (ie, being able to get to an album or an artist or a genre or a playlist from any song), but they did solve the problem of how much synching your device synched. A small number of people (i and one co-worker as far as I can tell) hate the lack of lateral navigation, but EVERYONE hated synching. Choosing what things are worth figuring out is a design approach.

Of course, this could do just famously, but there are so many broad brush strokes to this initiative that it’s hard to imagine that it won’t just turn into a set of Facebook features that gets whittled back, instead of something that revolutionizes messaging.

Perhaps the best line from Facebook indicating non-designery thinking is Zuckerberg’s line that Facebook Messages is “the way the future should work.” The way things should work is never a good design strategy.

I’ve long bought into Nicholas Carr’s argument that the surface-skimming behaviors created by Google/the web are changing and ultimately reducing my cognitive chops (so I use language like “cognitive chops” instead of “making me stupid” to compensate). But, last night, I experienced a new dimension of Google’s diminishment of our brains: the reduction meaning and culture to whatever the crowd says it is.

I had started reading Roger Martin’s book The Opposable Mind where Martin is setting up the argument about developing minds that can hold two opposing ideas at once and come up with a third. He leads with a semi-famous line from F. Scott Fitzgerald:

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that that things are hopeless yet, be determined to make them otherwise.

Martin develops the idea that we need to develop the capacity for “integrative thinking”, a mindset which, when confronted with two options, creates a third so that, and he quotes Wallace Stevens, we evolve to point of having “the choice not between, but of.”

Loving that Stevens line, I decided to Google it and find the original poem. Here are the results I got:

Every single result on the first page (and the second page) is a reference to Martin’s use of the line and integrative thinking.

Notice that that the search phrase is just for the line (and I tried a version with the word poem in it as well). For Google, our entry to knowledge, this line is no longer a line from a poem, but an argument from a business book. Wallace Stevens is irrelevant and his work is obscured in favor of Martin’s rhetorical deployment of it.

In fairness, this is less about Google and more about that much-celebrated crowdsourcing. This line has no cultural meaning except inasmuch as it captures a business idea. The most frequently accessed and linked-to references to the Stevens line are about integrative thinking, so maybe that’s what it means. Sad, sad, sad.

From The Register:

Between when the iPad began shipping in early April and the end of Apple’s most recent fiscal quarter, 7.46 million of its magical and revolutionary tablets found homes. Nielsen’s figures indicate that just under 2.4 million of those buyers — about half of whom identify themselves as “early adopters” — haven’t downloaded a single iPad app.

The Register‘s take is kind of clever. While Nielsen was reporting that nearly 2/3 of iPad users have downloaded apps, they got the story right: why are so many people not downloading them at all? This leads to the next question: of the 2/3 who are downloading apps, how many are actually using them in a meaningful way? There have been various reports that apps don’t get much use after purchase, so one might reasonably assume that those 2/3 aren’t getting much app usage.

On one Facebook stream, someone described having an iPad without using apps as being akin “to having a car but not going anywhere” — a pretty lame analogy considering that the iPad has a browser, a virtual keyboard, a mail client, a bookstore, and, oh yeah iTunes.

This could all change, but it looks like the iPad is turning into a great web browser, a light and portable movie player, and babysitter. Pretty useful, even if you aren’t playing Chaos Rings, Dismount, or Singing Fingers.

When I was learning to program in C/C++, for several days/weeks and on several attempts I hit the pointers plateau — that thing which, conceptually, I couldn’t get my head around sufficiently to really grok the damn things. I eventually took a class that spent three weeks on it and now I understand them — their purpose, their usage, their style and how to troubleshoot them. A couple summers ago, I took a geek vacation between jobs and worked my way through the NYU ITP Physical Computing class curriculum and dug deeper into some Arduino stuff.

After a couple weeks, I hit a plateau. I needed things like shift registers to multiply the number of LEDs I could manage with the Arduino’s 13 pins; I needed to use a 555 timer chip to get pulsing, and there was a whole range of chips starting named 74______ that were described as “hugely useful” or “workhorses”. These things were critical and basic, like pointers, but (like pointers) it was impossible to find documentation for them that was comprehensible to someone with my level of experience. It was one of the weird places where the web let me down. I must have done dozens of searches, asked everyone I could for help, and could find nothing. Which is a drag, cuz those chips are what give real ooomph to physical computing projects.

Make Magazine has fixed that with Make: Electronics, an unusually good book even by O’Reilly standards. It contains in-depth explanations of how transistors and logic gates work at the physical level — giving you a more intuitive sense of how to work with them (rather than following steps by rote); detailed descriptions of the pins at three levels: the official specs, the occasional nomenclature, and the actual function; and some simple circuits that show what the thing does. The last might be the most important. Even the most basic 555 Timer chip examples I could find had so much stuff going on that it was impossible to isolate the chip and learn, iteratively through tweaking the code, what the things does. To top it off, the Maker Shed Store has a components kit that pulls all the stuff (including jumper wires) together for you.

The one weird thing about the book is in the index:

What the hell kind of alphabetization system is this?

Of course, it’s not like I have time to do anything on my nifty hand-made workbench. But it’s nice to have it when I’m ready. Hope springs eternal. Put differently.

while (!endOfUniverse)
hope.spring();
;

Ha!

For several years, Steven Johnson’s Emergence, E O Wilson’s Journey of the Ants, and Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science have bounced around in my head, inextricably/apophenically connected to ideas of creativity, invention, and generative systems. Wolfram’s book, which I could follow through the first three pages of each chapter before the specific science and maths lost me, came and went – people were open to its revelations, found none, then, it seemed, he sank into crankdom. But, in his TED talk, he seems to be pulling it together – computation science (as opposed to computer science or computing) is a source of ideas, beauty, computing power. Best line:

in a sense we can use the computational universe as a way of getting mass customized creativity … to routinely do invention and discovery on the fly … and find all sorts of wonderful stuff that no engineer or incremental evolutionary process could ever come up with.

Steven Johnson is one of my favorite writers. With the exception of Interface Culture, I would gladly see every one of his books (Everything Bad is Good for You, EMERGENCE, Ghost Map, and even The Invention of Air) be made mandatory reading people in digital design, digital strategy, digital marketing. Johnson goes deep into cognitive patterns, longer arcs of human behaviors around entertainment, information-seeking, and learning and provides great frameworks for understanding the features and technologies that are usually the center of gravity in digital discussion.

His Time article on the iPad does a nice job of setting the right tone for discussion. Rather than being millenial (Apple fanboys) or crotchety (iPad haters), he grounds the conversation in the longer arc of how we’ve envisioned computing in the last ten or so years:

If you time-traveled back to 1995 and asked the leading futurists of that time where our machines were soon to take us, you might well have heard just as much rhapsodizing about document-centric interfaces as that about hypertext and the World Wide Web. The first generation of software interfaces forced the user to think too much about the tools, the story went, and too little about the task. …

The weird thing about the iPad is that it has landed us 180 degrees from where we thought we were heading. The iPad interface — like the iPhone’s — tries to do everything in its power to do away with documents and files. There is no Finder or root-level file navigation. It’s apps, apps, apps, as far as the eye can see. According to the demo last week, the main way to launch iWork documents is by an internal document-selection process after launch, where your files are presented to you in a gallery format.

I truly don’t know how I feel about this. It might be genius. Maybe most users are more confused by Finders and File Explorers than I’ve realized. But I can’t help thinking that if the iPad really wants to be a device that you might take on a business trip instead of the laptop, it’s going to need a little more document-centrism.

Couple things to love here:

- pointing out that there is a widget-centricity to the iPad. Hadn’t noticed it, but now that I think about it, it sounds like a bad way to make netbooks suck less.

- The comment that “most users . . . might be more confused than I realized”, highlights another weird dynamic in the discussion — just how bad do laptops and netbooks suck? Aren’t hundreds of millions of people living with these supposedly “fatally flawed” devices? A lot of the dialogue about the iPad as netbook talk about how unpleasant people find computing, but is the problem of OS stability and feature bloat so bad that we need a neutered appliance to replace it?

And what a great writer Steven Johnson is. I’ve been scribbling in my notebook, in evernote and two blog entries (this’n and this’n here) to get this idea across:

The iPhone revolutionized smartphones, but I think we all accept that smartphones were in our future. There is no equivalent consensus that tablets or couch computers or casual computers are inevitably on the road ahead. We don’t even agree on the aims here: Is the iPad replacing the laptop or supplementing it?

Anyway, a great article.

One of the smartest designers I know gave a typically compact and smart assessment of the iPad:

DOA. Apple does better (in the last 10 years or so) when it re-imagines categories, not when it invents them. I’m sure I will regret saying this, but that’s how I feel right now.

It does a nice job highlighting Apple’s strengths (re-invent what’s out there after drafting on others’ experience in the market and with an unwavering focus on user experience), but it also hints at the bigger problem: it’s trying to be several categories (reader, netbook, bigger media player, game platform, web browser), under one technology (shiny, thin, touch screen, with none of those nasty mechanics that collect crumbs from your lunch) without being any one thing that is clearly needed.

While Apple often wins by delivering better versions of stripped down, less function-laden things like the iPod, the iPad is doing this across too many categories and likely to fail in all but one:

Reader Steve Jobs infamously said he would never do a reader because people don’t read anymore. He’s actually onto something — some people are passionate readers, while most do it casually. This means the number of passionate readers is too small for an e-reader to be as big as the iPod. The iPad won’t serve either audience well. It will suck for passionate readers: the battery life is dubious, the finger smudges will be a drag, and most important, the backlighting will be prohibitive. Jane Jepson, the creator of the OLPC screen and founder of Qi technologies (LED displays) likened reading from a computer screen to putting a flashlight in your eyes, it’s unsustainable for passionate readers. Casual readers won’t read enough for it to be worth dropping a big chunk of change and things like beach reading, subway reading will be dicey with a fancy device that large. The math will look better than the Kindle’s — spending $400 on a Kindle vs buying books is a quick and obvious decision for many — but the all-in-one argument is pretty weak when it comes to the reading.

Netbook Jobs’s digs at netbooks totally miss the value they have for people who like having a portable work device. The iPad doesn’t replace the processing power or precise mousing needed for real apps like word processing or spreadsheets with graphics, and it’s still unclear whether typing on glass for extended periods of time (like writing something longer than an email or entering numbers into a budget) works for people.

Bigger Media Player This one is tricky to guess, but I have a hard time picturing people dropping serious coin on a third screen that is bigger than their phone but smaller than their TV. Where would you use it? To watch something in bed before going to sleep? Is that worth the cost of getting a decent flat screen?

Game Player Again, a risky proposition. What’s the market for people wanting to play games bigger than the iPhone but smaller than their console? What do those games look like? They’ll lack the immersion of a TV or computer screen game because it’s too small, but will they add to the little games of the iPhone?

Web browser Right on! The video on apple.com references the superior web browsing experience of the iPad many many times, and they’re right. Having the iPad in the living room (with a remote built-in) so I can do quick simple email tasks (like writing “you’re very welcome” as in the video, or forwarding with “FYI”, or deleting what you don’t need) and look up baseball stats while watching the Yankees on an iPad is vastly superior to using overheated macbook or my crunched netbook keyboard. I do a lot of web stuff while I watch crap TV and baseball, and, as a reasonably affluent convenience-obsessed guy with some concerns about the aesthetics of my appliances, this might be enough to see my way clear to $500.

But that’s it. The iPad will be a high-end version of the web appliance that we all talked about several years ago. Only it will be too fancy to use while cooking (one of the standard scenarios we all gushed about), and much too fancy for us to call it an appliance.

It’s got a look (or maybe it’s the music):